Andrei Chikatilo Biography

Andrei Chikatilo was a soviet serial killer, who killed a total of 56 people in Soviet Russia during the 70s and 80s. This biography profiles his childhood, personal life, family, crimes, death, and other facts.

Andrei Chikatilo was a soviet serial killer, who admitted killing a total of 56 people in Soviet Russia during the 70s and 80s before finally getting executed in 1994. He was nicknamed as Butcher of Rostov, the Rostov Ripper and the Red Ripper. Psychologists later concluded that he suffered from some psychological disorders since his early childhood and that played a great role in his chaotic set of beliefs. Apart from that, the conditions that he was born and brought up in moulded him as a menace to the overall fabric of the society. Many of his victims were women and children, who he sexually assaulted before brutally murdering. This particular behaviour, according to psychologists, developed as a result of his failure to have sexual intercourse with women and the subsequent ridicule he received led to a psychological scarring. ‘Citizen X’, a TV movie made on his life, is banned in many countries due to extremely violent and gory depictions of the murders he committed. He was finally caught after murdering his last victim, Sveta Korostik. He was caught by a patrolling policeman on suspicion and admitted of killing 52 people. Trial took place and he was sentenced to death, which took place in a Moscow jailhouse in 1994.

Andrei Chikatilo was born in a small village in Ukraine on 16th October 1936 amidst famine due to some political and economical disruptions. The children were dying out of starvation and having born in a poor family, Andrei couldn’t escape his fate and worse; the World War erupted, resulting into bombings of Ukraine from both Russia and Germany’s side. Ukraine became a living hell and growing up amidst it was extremely traumatizing for little Andrei.

If that wasn’t enough, Andrei suffered from a condition called hydrocephalus, which causes water on the brain from birth, which further led to some urinary tract disorders such as bed wetting and impotency to some degree. His father was sent to Germany to fight USSR’s wars and got tortured by the Germans and when the war was over, and he finally came back home, he was tried by the Soviet army, which led to constant torture and the family lived in constant fear.

The news spread about his father and Andrei’s school life caught up with his destructive health and emotional trauma due to his father’s notoriety as a traitor. He became the subject of bullying. He became a sexually frustrated teenager, and his first sexual encounter led him to even more of ridicule and name calling. Due to his health condition, he ejaculated almost immediately and the word spread around fast. He became a shy and introvert kid, and somehow, this caused his brain to form association between sex and violence.

He finished his high school education and due to his poor academics, he failed to enter the college and did National Service for some time before starting on a job as a telephone engineer.

His sister came to live with him and as she noticed that he was unable to attract the opposite sex, she fixed a date for Andrei with one of her friends. The couple lived together for sometime and despite Andrei’s inability in maintaining erection, he managed to hold his marriage and fathered two children. His brief stint as a schoolteacher came to a halt in 1971, when he was accused of assaulting kids and got fired.

In December 1978, Andrei committed his first murder and his victim was an adolescent girl, who he lured in a shed. Andrei tried to rape her first, but his inability to do so led him to slash the little girl Lena, while ejaculating on her body at the same time. This was his first tryst with the extremely violent sexual encounter, which later became a key factor in all his future murders. However, someone saw him with the victim a few hours before her disappearance and Andrei was arrested. But a fake alibi from his wife got him out of the prison.

He stayed low for the next three years or so and in September 1981, he decided to go for another murder and chose 17 years old Larisa Tkachenko as his next victim. This then became a fetish for Andrei, and he started hunting for victims of both sexes. He would meet them at bus stops or train stations and lure them into nearby abandoned places or forests, and rape them.

He entered knife in their bodies and ejaculated on them after that. In most of his early killings, he also took out the eyeballs of the victims, and later admitted to a psychologist that he did so because he believed that he didn’t want to see victims to see his face as they would remember it even after their death.

The Russian authorities woke up from a deep sleep as the dead bodies kept piling up. The murders were so brutal that the locales believed some supernatural evil entity or a werewolf was involved. The concept of serial killing was new to Soviet society in those days and a widespread fear prevailed everywhere. The Russian police became active and indulged in surveillances around the more affected areas around Rostov Park and City Centre.

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Andrei got arrested for suspicious behaviour on a bus stand in 1984, but due to the lack of evidence, he couldn’t get incarcerated for long, and he frequently saw the face of the prison due to minor offences. In 1985, Andrei moved to Novocherkassk and killed two more women. Police, unable to catch him, met with psychiatrists for help and interviewed several other serial killers to understand a killer’s state of mind but failed to gain some positive lead.

Andrei, by then well aware of police procedure, maintained a low profile for a few years, and when the the cases got cold and the trail for him went loose, he became active again in 1988 and killed 19 young people and it appeared that the killer was highly confident and rightly so, as in more than decade, police was unable to track him.

But eventually, Andrei’s good fortune vanished into thin air when he was caught by a police officer on 6th November 1990. He was coming back from killing his final victim when a patrolling policeman arrested him on suspicion of erratic behaviour. And eventually, he got linked to his previous arrest in 1984 for the murder which drew similarities with the recent murders.

In November 1990, the interrogation began, but when Andrei Chikatilo refused to admit anything, the police set-up a meeting with psychiatrist Bukhanovski, and Andrei began to admit his crimes and even led the police to the site of murders himself. He told the police that he has killed 56 people by then, but the police had records of only 36 of them.

Andrei’s trial started in April 1992 after a careful examination ‘proved’ that he was of a sound mind and body. He showed signs of boredom, irritation, and anger at abrupt intervals in court, and it became apparent that he was, in fact, mentally disturbed. The court’s verdict came in October 1992, and he was sentenced to death by a gunshot to his head.

On 14th February 1994, Andrei Chikatilo breathed his last in a Moscow prison, before a gunshot at the back of his head silenced him forever.

Media talked about him for months to come as the man who single-handedly terrorized millions of people. Several films were made on his life, which reeked of his devilish deeds and he eventually became one of the most notorious human beings to have ever walked on this planet.